Thursday, July 13, 2006

My third blogiversary came and went two days ago and I hadn't even noticed. But my first NanoBot post, on July 11, 2003, was actually just a condensed version of my column in a trade sheet I worked for at the time.

So, today is the anniversary of my first original NanoBot post. And you know, I think it holds up very well after three years. It also appears that I had time to write longer posts back before the births of my two sons. Anyway, set the Wayback Machine to July 13, 2003, Mr. Peabody, for an excerpt from The Hulk, Prince Charles and other scary things

... But here is where cartoon reality ... meets up with the almost equally cartoonish world of political debate and policymaking. Nanotechnology, and the implied idea that mankind is manipulating creation for his own benefit without a thought to the purpose of the creation itself, bothers many on the left and right -- it goes against God's law (right), or it goes against the laws of nature (left). The closer that manipulation comes to the human body, the louder the protests become. Left and right are joined against genetic manipulation, against the idea of man messing with the makeup of his own humanity -- "Playing God," in the eyes of the dogmatically religious. Of course, for the dogmatically left, you have your unwitting human guinea pig being experimented on by a government lab. Now, you have the absolute evil you need to keep the Hulk story moving.

And keep political futures moving in the other cartoon world of politics -- where exaggeration is fact, worst-case scenarios always happen and what is unknown is always deadly. It's exhilarating in our movies, but fosters ignorance and sets mankind's technological clock running backward in the reality of government oversight, funding and regulation. More here